


afire love

by bee_kind



Series: and all the world was open to you [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, X-Men (Movies), X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: F/M, M/M, Other, Reader-Insert, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, gender-neutral!reader, racially ambiguous!reader
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-19
Updated: 2018-05-10
Packaged: 2018-05-14 22:26:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 24
Words: 6,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5761201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bee_kind/pseuds/bee_kind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>people with skin like volcanoes shouldn't fall in love with men who had ice chips for eyes and could bend metal to their will.</p><p> </p><p>(an extension fic based on <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/5323568/chapters/13260154">this</a> prompt fill and <a href="http://stonelions.tumblr.com/post/124337611940/30-multipurpose-prompts-open-to-interpretation">this</a> list of prompts.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. the 11th

**Author's Note:**

> hey, guys! so, I really liked the 'verse I'd set up in the Erik chapter of IMSWYN, so I decided to expand on it a bit! This will go from your early days, to you discovering you're mutant, to meeting Erik and beyond! If there are any other drabbles from the fic you'd like to see be given this treatment, just let me know!

You’re born on the 11th of June and it’s the hottest day of the year. Forest fires spark off nothing and your mother is worried, she tells your father in urgent whispers as she clutches you close and a bead of sweat drips down her face, she worried that the hospital is too close to where they’re assaulting the flames and that her newborn will choke on ashes. Your father assures her that it’s fine. Even so, he closes the window and watches the both of you carefully as your mother thumbs over the silvery soulmark on your hand. It’s light and airy, written in perfect penmanship and it follows the curve of your palm.  _ Perfection _ , written clear as day. Perfection.    



	2. lost at the creek

When you’re only six years old, you slip the watch of your oldest sibling and dart down the hill toward the creek at the edge of your parents’ property. You must have played for hours. Must have, because when you look up, the sun is rapidly fading from the sky, the creek is high and you have no idea where you are. You don’t cry. Your father’d told you that crying was wasting energy that could be spent on solving the problem, so you look up at the quickly dimming sky and try to figure out which way is east.    
  
“Are you lost?” You turn and lay eyes on a brown-haired boy, maybe five years your senior. His voice is strange and you try to place it, come up blank. Nobody you knew spoke like he did. There’s a girl with him, the same age, and her hair is thick and blonde, perfectly coiffed. He speaks again before you can answer. “You’re lost. We can take you back home.” And he takes your hand in his, smiling so brightly that you’re blinded for a second. “I’m Charles, it’s lovely to meet you. She’s Raven.” The girl behind you offers a reserved smile and you blink at her, watching as  _ something _ ripples over her skin. Charles squeezes your hand. “You’re like us.” You tell him you don’t understand. He smiles, casts a look back at Raven. “You will.”    



	3. above, there is an attic

There’s an attic above your room where you go to hide in your smaller days, when you could still wiggle your way into the crevices and sit, back hunched, under the eaves of the house. It’s quiet there and you can see rain falling between the gap where the roof meets the east wall. You like to watch, sometimes, as the sun rises and greets the grass early in the morning. You pretend you’re the only breathing thing left in the whole entire world; then you remember that that would mean no Charles and no Raven either and you spit the thought out, let it wither in the recesses of your mind. You’re ten and Charles is nearly grown at 15, but you and Raven look of an age now. You tell her so one afternoon when they sit with you in the cramped space under the room. Charles shoots her a knowing look; Raven meets it, hazel eyes too bright for a fraction of a second. He still hasn’t told you what he means about the three of you being the same, but sometimes you swear your see Raven’s skin change from blue back to pink in the space it takes you to look her way. Sometimes you think Charles speaks your mind before you can. You sit still in that place and let him.    



	4. the tree is very old

The tree is very old, you tell yourself at the age of thirteen, your palms sweating as they rub against the rough cotton of your shirt. The tree is very old and it’s a sweltering June day, a week after the eleventh, and that’s why it bursts into flames when you kick it in frustration. You’ve just gotten a letter from Charles and Raven. They won’t be coming home on holiday and you can feel something crawling down your spine, a thickness in your throat, an itch in your hands you can't get out, and before you know what’s happening, the tree has erupted into a riot of color and heat. You fall back, the blaze is so intense and watch enraptured for a minute, vaguely aware of your mother screaming your name over the crackle and snap of the inferno before you. She scoops you up and hauls you backward as the light starts to fade from your vision, eyelids growing heavy. The tree is very old and you watch as it snaps in half, falling into the creek and hisses as it dies. Your head lolls back and you watch your mother shouting in slow motion.    
  
“Call the Fire Department!” She screams at your brother, who’s already launching himself across the table to get to the phone. Her head swings toward your father. “And then call Charles.” You wonder, before your eyes slip shut and you surrender to the dark, if this is what Charles meant when he said you were alike.    



	5. a figure at the edge of the woods

They come slowly, at first, just one aspiring journalist from the local secondary school’s in-house paper. She brings a notebook and a pen to write with; she doesn’t even have a camera. Still, her soul mark is lined up on her wrist in the blocky font of the newest typewriter, so you know she’s got a good thing coming to her. Your parents take her questions while you sit at the kitchen table and tap blunt nails against the worn wood. Your parents explain to the girl in no uncertain terms that what had happened to the oak tree was an accident that had had nothing to do with you. The metal eyelets on your shoes must’ve given off a spark that jumped to the tree when you kicked it. Sheer happenstance was the culprit, not the nervous child two rooms over. The older girl leaves, but on her way out the door, her eyes shift to you. You look away.    
  
In the weeks after she left, more and more journalists star appearing on your doorway, armed with their questions and cameras. Your parents only start to worry when out of town papers pick up the story and muscle their way in, eyes hungry. Your father orders them away; you mother locks the doors and draws the curtains, but they’re still there: figures at the edge of the woods waiting for a fire to catch. You start to sleep with pails of water at the foot of your bed.    
  
It’s three weeks  after the high school girl comes that Charles -finally,  _ finally- _ comes home. You don’t know what he does, but you wake up and it’s quiet and you know that all the journalists are gone. He’s sitting at the kitchen clutching a mug of coffee and it nearly spills all over him when you jump on him and bury your face in his shoulder. He laughs, wraps his arms around you and you breath him in deeply. He’s taller, you notice, and he smells different. He’s taken up smoking during his time at university and you make a note to scold him for it later.    
  
“I take it I was missed?” The tightening of your arms around his neck is answer enough.  He’s quiet for a beat, but a small sigh escapes his mouth. “You were scared.” He always seemed to know what you were feeling before you spoke it aloud. He pulled away for a second, holding you by the shoulders. “There’s something we need to talk about.” You find you don’t like the tone in his voice. You were right to be wary; what he says next rips your world apart.    



	6. horses anticipating a storm

You know, in retrospect, that sending Charles away was the wrong thing to do. You know he can help you, even as you stare blankly at your hands, one of his own on your shoulder; even as you push him off of you and call him a liar, even as you watch hurt fill his eyes. Even as he grabs his coat and leaves, pulling his presence from your mind and you feel -for the first time in seven years-  _ alone,  _ as if he’d always been with you before. It’s quiet   _ -painfully _ quiet,  _ deadly _ quiet- after he goes and you don’t leave your room. You clutch the letters he wrote you so tightly that they crumple to ash in your fingertips. You aren’t sorry.    
  
It’s two years later, when you’ve pulled the word ‘alone’ over your shoulders like a blanket and haven’t seen or spoken to Charles in what feels like an eternity that you notice the tips of your fingers turning black, your veins running a vicious red beneath the darkened skin. You don’t know how, but you know that the end has begun. You show your parents one morning at breakfast and your mother whispers something under her breath and clutches at the silver cross at her neck and your father’s jaw locks up and they flit about the house nervously for the rest of the week, jumping from task to task like horses anticipating a storm, ready to bolt at any moment. You regret making them worry.   
  
It’s almost a relief when your hair starts to fall out, because at least now it’s begun; at least now  _ IT _ isn’t some dark, shadowy thing lurking behind corners and under bed frames. The black swallows up your hands and creeps down your forearms setting your veins ablaze and boiling your soulmark. ‘Perfection’ is covered up charred flesh and blood like magma, making it blaze an iridescent red so intense that you can barely look at it. Your mother cries when she finds clumps of your hair in the bathroom and you know the storm has broken.   



	7. one foot in another world

You’re sixteen when you stop going to school and your mother draws the shades shut with an air of finality. They snap into place and somehow you know in your soul that they won’t open again. Your mother schools you at home after your father drives his truck to the nearby school and informs them that you have pneumonia and you’ll likely be out for the rest of the year. They know better than to ask questions. They give him your books and strike your name from all of the rosters.    
  
The first month is the hardest and you cry and plead with your mother to let you go back to class. You promise to cover your head so that no one can see how much hair you’ve lost. You promise to dip your scorched, ash laden arms in paint the same color as your skin. You want to feel the sun on your back and laugh with your friends again. She tells you to forget your friends because they have already forgotten you. You swear to prove her wrong.    
  
Another month passes, then two and no one comes to visit like they did in the old days, catcher’s mitt in hand and a bat tucked under their arm to invite you to play softball up in the schoolyard. Three months and you get used to being inside all day, four and your own voice sounds like an intrusion into the solemn silence your surround yourself. You start to miss Charles terribly. You consider writing him a letter, but every time you hold a pencil that isn’t metal, it starts to smoke in your hands. You resign yourself to solitude.    
  
In the sixth month, a circus starts pitching its tents about a half mile up the road from your parents’ house and two of your siblings closest in age to you beg to go. Your parents deny them, determined not to give them opportunities you yourself couldn’t enjoy. For all their uncertainty about the future, they tried. The knowledge that they try doesn’t stop you from sneaking out late one night to go gawk at colored lights and fairy floss and your mother’s piece of mind doesn’t stop you every night for the next three weeks either. You stay there, one foot in another world, straddling the fence for as long as you can manage.    
  
They don’t gawk at your skin when they find out. They don’t scream or scurry away or hide. They tell you the magma in your veins is beautiful, that the sparks dripping from your mouth are something to be marveled at. You’re only a week from seventeen, too young still to know when someone is playing you for a fool. When they pack up a week later, you go with them, leaving nothing behind. Your mother will weep over you, you’re sure, but you’ve lightened her burden. She wouldn’t have let you go if you’d tried to say goodbye. You leave without so much as a backward glance, but as the caravan pulls away, you have the acute, niggling feeling that you won’t ever see her again. 


	8. face on the other side of a dark window

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, if you guys would like another ship done like this, just drop me a prompt challenge and I'll see if I can do it!

You don’t know what you’d expected, but it certainly wasn’t this.    
  
The colored lights and fairy floss and nights filled with fantasy had left you far behind and no matter how hard you ran, you couldn’t keep up with them. All they’d left in their wake was a gray dawn, ashes turning cold under your finger tips and the knowledge that you could never, ever go home. Your body ached.   
  
People with skin like volcanoes drew crowds and the ringmaster had known you were a headliner the moment he’d seen you, all charred flesh and smoky words. People came to gawk at you and not because they thought you were beautiful; they came to throw stones. They put you in an act with one of the better looking acrobats, made them feign love for you and called the show ‘Sympathy for the Devil.’ People jeered at you whenever you took the stage. When you’d refused to perform one night, they’d slipped sedatives into your food and an elephant’s leg chain around your neck. The mix they’d given you was too strong. The magma in your veins cooled and you could barely stand, much less perform.   
  
They stick you in with the members of the troupe who are too old and broken down to do much of anything anymore. You become the highlight of the freak show at nineteen. On good days children throw silver coins at your feet in supplication, pleading for bad luck to be kept away from them. On good days you can muster up the energy to let flames dance on your finger tips. On good days it’s only your neck that hurts, chafing beneath your collar and you hardly notice that you can’t remember your name any more. The bad days you try to forget as soon as they’re over, covering up virulent red wounds that leak magma with scraps of fabric torn from old costumes. On bad days, you clutch at the faded photograph of your family, look over their faces one by one and try, try your hardest to remember their names. The sedatives usually put you to sleep before you could finish.    
  
It’s toward the end of one of the bad days that a man enters your tent, tall and broad and handsome. You can barely see him through the smoke -he’s little more than a face on the other side of a dark window- but you can see his eyes. They’re bright blue and for a moment you allow yourself the luxury of hope. A face floods your memory, a voice, but the man comes closer and you see that he’s not him. Your Charles is long gone and he wouldn't dare reach into the mire and muck of this place to fish you out. You'd sent him away and he'd stay away. You kill the flutter in your chest and go to work. You recite the script they’d beaten into you with ease, words rolling from your tongue with little effort. This didn’t require focus, you certainly weren’t giving it any, but the man with his ice blue eyes is staring into the barren planes of your face like you’re quoting scripture. You’re just about to get to the bit about stealing his soul when he stops you to answer the question you pose to all of your patrons.    
  
“Perfection.” He says simply and you can breathe again.    



	9. driving for many hours through mountains

All you remember is the creaking of the ferris wheel and tent nails swirling like a hurricane around you. All you remember is the crush of arms holding you close to a warm, broad chest and the sound of a steady heartbeat in your ears before you fall asleep, the sudden range of motion too much for you after being stagnant for… How long had it been? You’d left in the summer, but it was still summer now, wasn’t it? You remembered snatches of frost and leaves carpeting the fairground, but it didn’t feel like long at all. You supposed you could thank the sedatives for that. You let thoughts of time carry you into the empty black of your dreams.    
  
When you wake, you wake briefly, only to catch a glimpse of a narrow road through with snowbanks on either side and starlight illuminating your saviors face. His eyes flick toward you for a moment and he speaks, saying something about how you’ve been driving for many hours through mountains and how you have many more to go, but you barely hear him. The thrumming of the car’s engine is enough to put you back to sleep. 


	10. the photograph

The only thing you’d brought with you from home that the ringmaster had let you keep was an old, war torn photograph of your family. You’d hidden it in the corner of your tent, under piles of musty straw and ash hoping to God that they wouldn’t clean out your cage while you waited to come down from the latest hit of sedatives they dosed you with. You’d tucked it into costumes, stashed it in crevices, folded and refolded it so many times that the creases nearly obscured the faces of your family. You filled in the gaps left by them.    
  
Even now, you clutch it between fragile hands as the man who saved you bears you up too many stairs to count, wrapped in his coat and your head lolling back against his arm. You’re sleep drunk and still half-sedated, but you’re beginning to feel things again: The weight of your legs, dangling out of his grasp. The feeling of rough fabric against your stone hewn skin. The deep hollowness in your stomach from losing the people in the photograph. The two former you could ignore but the latter was an emptiness you didn’t think you’d ever be able to fill.    



	11. in search of sea life

You realize, at some point that he’s put you in a tub and you watch him, eyes hazy as he swabs the grime from one of your cheeks.  Your eyes slip shut and the water rolls over your limbs and you remember when your parents had driven you all out to the beach one afternoon in mid-July and you and your siblings had spent the entire day in search of sea life. You begin to cry and the man sits in silence beside you until the erratic rhythm of your sobs and the water rocking you put you to sleep.    
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey, y'all, I know it's been awhile! I spilled water on my laptop and had to wait for it to get fixed and then got really busy with school, but here's two chapters to tide you over.


	12. a blue tin kettle

When Eric pulls you from the now cold water, his hands are rough and scarred, but quiet. He takes great care with you and you don’t know what to think because no one has touched you gently in years and the brush of his fingertips, feather light against the wasteland of your skin is almost more than you can bear. It takes hours for him to convince you that you won’t reduce him to ashes, hours more for you to let him fold you into a bed -a real, actual bed, not a pile of straw pushed up against the corner of a wagon, not a bathtub. You cry through the night and he sits by your bedside and lets you. It will be months before you can sleep through the night. It will be years before the smell of popcorn and fairy floss doesn’t make you want to vomit. It will be a decade before you can stand to share a bed with your own soulmate. You will never stop flinching when someone reaches out to touch you.    
  
You wake to the popping of eggs in a frying pan and the smell of black coffee wafting from a blue tin kettle you swear is hovering an inch off of the stove. You blink slowly, eyes adjusting to the sunlight. Sunlight. You turn your head slowly, newly awoken muscles protesting and stare out of a window by the bedside into the streets of a city below. You hear metal clatter against dishes and snap your head back to the front just in time to see the broad shouldered man scooping scrambled eggs onto two wide plates. He turns to toss the pan into the sink and locks eyes with you from across the room.    
  
“What…” Your voice sticks in your throat, disuse making it rusty. “What year is it?” The corner of his mouth twitches and you think you see words -your words? could you still write?- catch the light right beneath the hollow of his throat.    
  
“1967.” He answers, voice strange. He’s not American and his voice reminds you of someone else’s, half remembered with kind eyes and hot summer evenings spent down by a creek. “It’s June 11th.”    
  
“It’s my birthday.” You tell him, eyes drifting back toward the window and the people scurrying through the streets below, small as ants. “I’m twenty-three.”


	13. wanderer on a scorched path

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys, so with the exception of a few filler chapters, the rest of this fic is completely planned and i'm gonna start in on getting chapters out pretty quickly soon. I wanna put this one on the 'completed' roster.

He tells you his name is Eric and you tell him he makes you nervous.   
  
He doesn’t seem surprised or offended by that. You guess he’s been in the business of making people nervous for a very long time. He isn’t frightening -not at all, he wouldn’t hurt you, he tells you one night when you flinch away from him reaching out to pull a blanket up over your shoulders. He said wouldn’t, because he’s more than capable of rending you limb from limb and you’re more than capable of reducing his life to a pile of ashes. You’re dangerous and so is he and you’re sure that you two could destroy each other in the most beautiful way.    
  
You don’t want to destroy him, though. You think about this three sunday’s into your stay in the apartment you’ve figured out is somewhere in Germany. You’re sitting on the couch that folds out into your bed -you wouldn’t take Eric’s, even though he offered every night. You weren’t ready yet to have a space that seemed that permanent. You liked the couch because it was there when you needed it and not when you didn’t- and Eric has dozed off beside you, the newspaper open on his lap. You’re curled up, arm just brushing his, a mug of tea clasped between your hands. This was comforting, this was safe, but just barely. You’re still tensed to run at any moment and despite his held the past three weeks, you still lost years. The last thing you remember, you were sixteen and visiting the circus and the whole world was open to you. Your eyes drift over your soulmate’s face. The noble bridge of his nose, the sharp lines of his jaw, his soft contradiction of a mouth. He was too beautiful, too righteous to harm and you wouldn’t make him a wanderer on a scorched path, a bystander in the havoc you wrought. He’d saved you, but you’d care for him.    
  
“I promise.” 


	14. it had no eyes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry it's taken me so long to update this, yall! I've been trying to hammer away at the ink queue and i'm slowly but surely getting to the end of it. if there's a particular drabble from ink that you'd like to see expanded like this one, just let me know.

It’s the tail end of January in ‘68 when Erik gets you back on American soil.   
  
He takes you by back channels. A pilot owes him a favor, he pays as security guard on the tarmac to look the other way. For a man who claims his only real job was as a former teacher, he’s surprisingly good at forging passports when he needs to be. He wraps you in linen and holds you close to his chest the entire flight.   
  
When you land in the tiny airport in upstate New York and your feet touch the soil of your homeland for the first time in only God knows how long, your knees buckle, and your bury your fingers in damp dirt and let sparks dart around your eyes. You are happy and grateful and you press a kiss to Erik’s cheek that only singes his three-day old stubble a little. He didn’t mind it; he’d been meaning to shave. The pilot leaves and Eric wraps you in his coat and you start to make way toward the road where he tells you there’s a car waiting.    
  
You never make it to the car, end up having to run from men in uniforms instead, chasing some poor creature in a hospital gown. Erik pulls you behind a tree, presses you close to his chest. The thing swings it’s head toward you, let’s out a strangled cry and you dig your fingers into your soulmate’s shirt. It had no eyes. It had no eyes, but you knew, in some deep, dark part of yourself that it saw everything. You squeeze your eyes shut and try not to flinch when you hear the gunshot. 


	15. please, let's go home

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> surprise, i'm not dead

You want to leave, to forget everything that’s just happened, to unsee the blood staining the pine needles not fifty feet from you, but Erik holds you tight until the men with guns are gone and then follows them, his hand never leaving yours. You try to stifle your sobs the best you can. You cry tears of magma that singe the ground, but Erik doesn’t so much as look your way. Something’s taken him and he looks haunted. He’s seen this or something like it before you’re sure.   
  
He tracks them to the edge of the woods and out to the road, staying just far enough within the treeline that they can’t see him or you, despite how you glow in the shadows. There’s a black truck on the road, the letters ‘MRD’ emblazoned on the side in blocky lettering. You have no idea what it means, but you know to be afraid.  You tug at your soulmate’s arm, small voice pleading, “Please, let’s go home.” If he hears you, he makes no move to respond. Your grip on his hand tightens. “Erik, I want to go.”    
  
“Alright.” He says, letting you turn and pull him gently back into the woods. “Okay.” He pretends to come willingly and you pretend you don’t see his hand twitch or hear the truck crumpling in on itself, metallic groans and human screams mixing together in a nauseating symphony. 


	16. small birds, dry grass

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> two chapters in one night?!?! what is this?!?!

The house you grew up in was small, but big enough to fit your family of seven quite comfortably. You remember nestling into whatever cranny you could find with your oldest sister, your head on her chest, her hand stroking your hair as she read to you from Jane Eyre or, in the mornings before school, taking a bag of seed and sitting in the field out front that passed for a lawn feeding the small birds, dry grass, taller than you were, as much a home to you as the four walls at your back. As you step out of the car, you reach out to these memories, hold them tight, they will be all you have left.   
  
The house you grew up in in nothing more than a rotted out beam, scorch marks and ash. In it, you try to find every Christmas, every Fourth of July, try to sift out the smell of your father’s aftershave from the air of decay but you cannot. Whatever lived there is gone now, long gone, along with the last sliver of hope you’d had to be the prodigal child coming full circle. No one is left to greet you at the door, there will be no more feasts in your name. You clutch the fading photograph in your coat pocket tight, whisper their names to yourself like a prayer.    
  
“Witch hunt.” Says the man who’d offered to drive you up to the house. He scrapes a match into life and holds it underneath a blackened pipe. “After one of the children left, the demon that’d had its grips on the family stuck around, sunk it’s claws into the youngest boy.” Your jaw tightens and Eric draws closer to your side, makes sure your skin is covered, that the flames seeping through your veins just below the surface are covered. “They said he could see things. He knew when accidents were gonna happen. He stopped a few, but a rotten tree fell down at the school down the road and killed six kids. People thought he’d decided not to warn them, so they came down here and-”   
  
Whatever he says after that, you don’t hear. The wind starts up and shifts the ashes. You try not to see an accusation in the way they dance.    


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> nah, but for real though, i'm on a roll. this thing is gonna be done before the week is out.


	17. a hero in the wrong

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> like i said, on a roll.

The ease with which your soulmate took a life frightened you.    
  
The man’s wedding ring came off and suddenly it was through his forehead and he was lying on the ground, mouth agape. As if he feels your alarm he whips around in the seat, wraps his arms around you, his much larger frame blocking the evidence of his sin from your view. He presses his lips to the top of your head and you close your eyes, inhale him. “He would have told the MRD about us.”   
  
“Would he?” He doesn’t answer you, merely pops the driver’s side door and pushes the man out the side. As he drives away you catch the reflection in the rearview mirror and for the first time you see the two of you for what you really are: a runaway and a hero in the wrong, heart hard and unforgiving. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you'd like to see another prompt from ink my skin with your name given this treatment, just drop me a prompt list and with fillet you'd like! i might just pick it!


	18. unearthed bones

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> b4 any of y'all clock me, i know it's short. more chapters are coming, i'm just going to a party rn. k bye

You sleep in the car.    
  
It’s not that you’re tired, it's just that when you’re asleep you don’t have to contemplate the morality of the man sitting at your side. You don’t have to think about how you don’t actually know anything about him. You don’t have to think at all. You slip into the empty blackness of your dreams and find refuge in the silence of your own mind. When you wake, you’re across the border and Erik is still gripping the wheel, blue eyes hard and unforgiving as steel. He feels you stir beside him and her turns to you, smiles in a way that seems unnatural and deeply unsettles you. The smile doesn’t reach his eyes and his teeth, glinting in the twilight, look like unearthed bones, bleached and bared to the sky. You swallow and try not to flinch when he covers your hand with one of his. You go back to sleep. 


	19. the sensation of falling as experienced in a dream

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the song mentioned in this chapter is 'growing older, feeling younger' by bette davis

You’re sitting at your mother’s kitchen table and Erik is beside you. Your skin is soft to the touch and there’s sunlight streaming in through the window and the sun is shining. You can hear your father singing along to some old bette davis number, crooning in that slow raspy voice that used to sing you to sleep as he slow dances with your mother, their feet barely touching the carpet. “ _ -There’s a world that’s for the young, a time when golden songs are sung… _ ” and you can hear your siblings playing in the front yard, some pick-up game of baseball with old towels for bases and you laugh and you laugh and you laugh. There’s Erik’s hand atop your’s and he stands the both of you up and suddenly it’s him singing as he pulls you close, your head pressed against his chest. “ _ -Growing older, feeling younger -What can we do? Time is so fleeting. April fools us, winter rules us. Autumn and spring, they have no meeting _ …” He spins you just so and you see a shadowed face in the window. It’s Charles. He has a hunted look in his eyes like a starving man, like a man who no longer knew what peace was and he’s come to wake you up. It’s a dream, you know. You know it’s a dream because you’ve had the dull sensation of falling only experienced in a dream tying knots in your stomach and there wasn’t all this happiness in the world. He opens his mouth to say something to you, but you drown out his words with your own voice, sweet in a way it hadn’t been in years. “ _ -Love comes along; there is the danger. Truth is a mirror, youth is a stranger… _ ” But it’s too late. The light is fading. The children laughing outside have gone silent and your parents are only shadows now, growing more fragile by the second. “ _ Growing older, feeling younger… _ ” Charles presses his hand to the glass and despite wanting to turn away you can’t. Erik has gone cold and stiff before you, the sunlight is gone and the kitchen has disappeared. Bette Davis’s voice, filmy and forgotten has evaporated and all that’s left is your and the telepath. He mouths the words  _ WAKE UP! _ A command you can’t ignore. Even as the dream slips between your fingers, you sing out the last words of the song “ _...Why can't time stand still?” _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i have eleven chapters left someone kick my ass and make me finish them they aren't even that long what the heck


	20. how far can you carry this

When you were a child, the three of you had gone down to the creek near your house all lined up: you walked behind Raven, Raven walked behind Charles and Charles walked out front, smiling wide and ready for the world. You’d spend all day up to your knees in bitter cold water, collecting smooth stones to go skip in the pond on his property. The three of you had filled a satchel with as many as you find and when the sun had started to disappear behind the trees, he’d looped the satchel over your shoulders. “ _ How far can you carry this? _ ” He’d asked, half-joking. The bag had been nearly as big as you were but you’d still gripped it tight, pushed your chin out in juvenile determination. “ _ As far as you need me to _ .” You’d fallen three times and skinned your palms and knees badly, but wouldn’t let either of your friends help you, despite the gravel ground into your skin, despite your blood flecking the pavement. You always had stuck with things til the bitter end.    
  
You didn’t know why the memory had popped into your head. It was of little concern now when you were nearly twenty years and so many miles away, but there it was, niggling and insistent at the back of your skull. You stuck with things that could hurt you like bags far too heavy for you to carry, and fly-by-night circus troupes and men who had no problem with murder- You close your eyes. He was back. You knew that as certainly as you knew Erik loved you and that the sun would rise in the morning. Charles had found you and he would not let you go, not now that he knew who had you. ‘ _ If he can find you, so can anyone else. _ ’ the thought causes your heart to jump and you’re not sure if it belongs to you or someone else. In either case, you shove it violently down and focus on the trees streaming by on either side of a stolen car. The road is familiar in the way all things before your abandoning of your family were: comforting, but wrapped in barbed wire nostalgia. You had no right to miss a life you’d thrown into the trash.    
  
You did, though.   
You missed it terribly.   
  
Wrought iron fencing approaches on your right and you let out a small noise, alerting your soulmate to the fact that you’re awake. Cobalt eyes flick to the side, watching you for a brief moment before returning to the road. “What’s wrong?” You knew this place, had visited on sunday afternoons with bouquets of flowers from your mother’s small garden, had laid them on the grave of a grandmother you’d never known out of duty. Headstones appear, dotting dying grass and you give a sharp exhale.    
  
“Pull over.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> only a few more chapters -ten, to be exact- and a lot of them are written. i might finish this before the month is out.


	21. conversations with the crows

Your family’s plot is easy enough to find.    
  
It’s the newest set of stones, still shiny with ceramic glaze, engraving still fresh and black as your youngest sibling’s hair, as your father’s work pants, as the new road they’d paved outside your school where you and your classmates had played kickball what felt like centuries ago. You kneel in front of the stone that has you mother’s name, press a hand to the marble. It’s warm and you close your eyes and imagine that it’s the oven you’d sat in front of waiting for her pies to be done, that it’s the bed she’d used to tuck you into after a long day spent with Charles and Raven, that it was anything but a grave stone and that your mother was still alive somewhere, doing anything but holding conversations with the crows. You feel Erik’s hand, rough and big on your shoulder. He squeezes.    
  
“I’m sorry.” He says and you know he means it. You wipe magma tears from your cheeks with the back of your coat sleeve, ignore the way they burn through the wool.    
  
“It’s not your fault.”   



	22. a book infested with ghosts

He leaves the motel room sometime in the night. He thinks you’re asleep, but you’re not. How could you sleep with your head swarming with regret and your heart balled up like a fist in your throat? You couldn’t and so you lay in bed contemplating at first the back of your eyelids, and then the planes of your soulmate’s face and then the silent darkness of room at large, clock ticking insistently above the bathroom door. You were surprised this place was still open. It had always seemed like it was on it’s way out; on walks home from school you and your friends would try skipping stones over the murky pool water, gray green from disuse. It never had shut down and for that you were grateful. The man at the counter didn’t flinch when Erik handed him a wad of cash, didn’t even blink when you sneezed and embers came floating out into the air. It wasn’t his job to ask and so he didn’t, merely went back to the static-filled television and his silent vigil over the front desk.    
  
When you first get into the room, you shed for the first time in days all your layers and cool yourself enough to manage lying in the bed, the sheets twisted around your legs. Erik goes down soon afterward, flops down in front of you, tucks your head under his chin and drapes his arm over your waist. He waits until he hears your breathing deepens and then rises, grabs his shoes and disappears into the night. For three horrible hours you lie awake, contemplating if he’d leave you here by yourself. You knew logically that he wouldn’t. He loved you more than life itself, had saved you, had killed for you and still looked at you like you were a marvel each new day. Erik loved you, but that niggling insistence of ‘what if’ in the back of your skull wouldn’t go away. It was an ugly thought and you hated it, but still it stayed until the moon had set and the first pale fingers of dawn started stretching into the sky.    
  
At 5:49 he comes back- you know the time because you’ve been watching the clock, heart jumping with every tick- and he comes back with something in his arms, something thick and smelling of ash. He rubs your back gently, waking you from yoru faux sleep and sets it on your lap- it’s your family’s photo album, now a book infested with ghosts, and as you flip through the pages, the faces haunt you.    
  
“I went back.” He says softly, like he’s afraid his voice is an intrusion. “You should have something from home, something you can take with you.” You pull him toward you and lean up, kissing him gently, heat from your mouth making his own steam.    
  
“Thank you.” You say. “Thank you.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yo, should i add low-key, light, poetic smut to this or no? thought?


	23. forgetting why it mattered

“Let’s get out of this town.” It comes late one morning while the two of you are still lying in bed, Erik on his back, your cheek pressed to the bare skin of his chest. “Let’s leave it all behind.” You look up at him, but find ice blue eyes, half-lidded, already on you. His expression is unreadable, but his lips look soft and you reach up, run your thumb over them. The corner of his mouth quirks up and something in you melts at the sight.     
  
“Okay,” he says, his larger hand circling yours and pressing your knuckles against his lips. “Alright.”    
  
By the time the clock on the nightstand’s hands are both at the twelve, you’re already in the stolen car, halfway out of town and already forgetting why it mattered. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> only a few more filler chapters!


	24. the protection of laughter

You’d like to say it’s Erik’s voice that wakes you up, soft baritone singing in German, but it’s the smell of eggs hot off a griddle and the tea he knows you love but he doesn’t drink. He prefers coffee so black it reflects the artificial lights of your hotel room, but you both love pastries and so he passes you a croissant over the table, goes back to reading the paper. You allow yourself a brief smile at how domestic it all feels, pop a strawberry into your mouth. You wish the two of you could stay there forever safe in some no name Massachusetts town tucked safe behind walls of plaster and false wood, but you can’t. You enjoy it while it lasts, though: the protection of laughter and tenuous bliss. 


End file.
